There was no English document available on the 1st when I did this (I guess the end of FY took it out of them 🤣), so I used the French version…my now 909 day Duolingo streak is coming in handy!
Nothing major changed or announced which is to be expected; being the start of their new financial year (and when everyone goes on holiday), July & August are often pretty quiet. What we’ve got is:
“System Center Configuration Manager” is renamed to “Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager”. The first real sign of anything happening with this new product name since it was announced a few months back.
“Azure Monetary Commitment” is now “Azure prepayment”.
If you have 1 or more licenses of Project Plan 1/3/5, all O365 users on that tenant get limited access to “Project for the web” customer data. No access to Power Platform apps and doesn’t apply to public sector.
Microsoft have announced they’re shutting all their stores worldwide, although they’re retaining the following four as “experience centres”:
New York City
London
Sydney
Redmond (Microsoft Campus)
Microsoft stores always seemed like an attempt to keep up with Apple – they looked pretty similar and, in many cases, they were physically located very close to Apple stores – and I’m not sure how integral they’ve really been in terms of sales etc. I’ve only been to a couple – one out in Virginia and the other (I think) in LA and, to be fair, they were pretty cool. That said, I think the biggest benefit of stores is to check out the hardware – click the buttons, pick it up, feel the screen etc. and between places like Currys PC World and the “stores” Microsoft have within John Lewis, I think most places in the UK have the ability.
I also think a big part of the stores was to raise consumer awareness of Microsoft. It was certainly the case that their general level of recognition had dipped with many non-tech consumers and also their reputation wasn’t always the greatest. The stores gave them an opportunity to be seen by people who weren’t already looking for them, for the casual mall browser to “pop in” and take a look around, for the Xbox buyer to also see what else Microsoft had to offer. Now, several years later, it’s clear to most that Microsoft’s position is much improved. The Surface range is well known and Teams has given them broad appeal across many types of staff – and the public sector too.
Some are saying that Microsoft are “giving up on consumers” but I think it’s more a case of going where the consumers are. Online shopping was already the “go-to” for many in 2019 but COVID-19 has increased that significantly and, while some will rush back to the crowded shopping centres and malls, many will not. For a lot of people, they’ve realised that buying things online works very well and, making sure you choose places with a sound returns policy, even changing your mind isn’t much of a problem really.
Microsoft will take $450 million hit on this but that’s not really a huge amount for them. As long as they have a clear strategy for how they will continue to engage with users online, I don’t see there being much downside to this really.
June is the last month of Microsoft’s financial year but they’re still made a few changes worth noting in this month’s Product Terms:
5 year reservations for Azure VMs are added – with a 35% early termination fee
Azure Hybrid Rights for SQL have been expanded so now:
on-premises SQL Server Standard licenses can be used to run SQL Server Enterprise VMs in Azure
on-premises SQL Server Enterprise licenses can be used to run SQL Server Standard VMs in Azure
Changes to the eligibility for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 F1 & F3 licenses
SQL Server
The core conversion ratio is different for the two new scenarios:
4 x SQL Server Std on-prem cores w/SA = 1 x SQL Server Ent Azure core
1 x SQL Server Ent on-prem core w/SA = 4 x SQL Server Std Azure core
You can see the above table, and the info, on pages 54-54 of the June 2020 Product Terms.
F1/F3 changes
Microsoft have again changed the rules around who is eligible for a “Firstline” SKU. The new requirements are that to qualify for an F1/F3 license a worker must satisfy at least one of these conditions:
Uses a primary work device with a single screen smaller than 10.1”
Shares their primary work device with other qualifying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 Firstline Worker licensed users, during or across shifts
Other licensed Microsoft Firstline Worker users must also use the device as their primary work device
Any software or services accessed from the shared device requires the device or users to be assigned a license that includes use of those software or services
The previous guidance, updated in November 2019, was:
“A Dedicated Device is a computing device used for work with a 10.1” screen or larger, used by the user more than 60% of the user’s total work time during any 90-day period.”
These new rules should make it a bit easier for everyone to police but, for organisations already licensed for F1/F3 prior to June 1, 2020, you can continue to license based on the previous rules until your next renewal.
Microsoft have introduced their first vertical specific cloud offering – Cloud for Healthcare. Currently in public preview, the stated aims of this are to:
Enhance patient engagement
Empower health team collaboration
Improve insights
and, considering the current Coronavirus situation, focusing first on healthcare makes sense. They highlight that over 1,600 “COVID-19 bots” have gone live since March across 23 countries and we’ve already seen a huge rise in Azure usage during the last couple of months. The offering will span Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and more.
What’s next?
I look forward to seeing which other verticals are next to receive their own cloud and also, over the long term, if we start to see features and licensing differences between them. As cloud goes from being presented as one monolithic thing that everyone uses to separate, discrete offerings tailored to different industries, it will be much easier to introduce commercial differences. I imagine we’ll see some more about these at Microsoft Inspire in July.
Microsoft are changing the Office 365 update models again!
1) They’re introducing the “Monthly Enterprise Channel” – for orgs who want new features each month but with “added predictability, insights and control”…although the insight and control elements won’t be available until later in the year.
This was available as of May 12th, 2020.
2) June 9th sees name changes for the update channels (old name –> new name):
Insider –> Beta Channel
Monthly Channel (Targeted) –> Current Channel (Preview)
3) June 9th will also see the default update model for Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise (aka Office 365 ProPlus) on NEW tenants switch to Current Channel, rather than Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel. Existing tenants won’t change.
Microsoft have been big on driving the “low code/no code” movement through their Power Automate and Power Apps products for a while now. They coined (or at least popularised) the term “Citizen Developer” for people who aren’t “traditional” developers but are creating their own applications with these new tools and there is a growing community too.
April saw the introduction of new RPA (Robotic Process Automation) licensing for Microsoft 365 and Power Automate – which I looked at here. Now, Microsoft have announced the acquisition of Softomotive to boost the capabilities of Power Automate via their WinAutomation offering – which, if you have a Power Automate RPA attended license, is available at no extra cost.
RPA is definitely an area of increasing importance, driven by the impact of COVID-19 to a large degree, and certainly represents a big focus and growth area for Microsoft and its partners. It is also a whole new area for licensing confusion and disagreements so whatever your role, pay attention to the robots! 🤖
There have been reports recently that some users in certain regions were hitting capacity limits in Microsoft Azure when trying to create new resources. Microsoft have shared some information around the impact the coronavirus epidemic is having on their cloud infrastructure:
775% increase in cloud services (in regions performing lockdown)
Teams up to 44 million daily users, running over 900 million minutes of meetings and calls each day
Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) usage increased 3x
42% increase in government use of Power BI for sharing COVID-19 dashboards
Some of these numbers are pretty mind-blowing and one can see how they might catch a cloud vendor by surprise.
Cloud Datacentre provisioning
Microsoft say they will be adding “significant new capacity” over the coming weeks to help support this increased use.
Something I’m sure Microsoft have considered is how much of this extra usage will continue?. What happens as things start to return to normal and some of this usage starts to drop off? They’ll be left with more unused capacity than their models anticipated – might this lead to them raising prices on certain Azure services in the future?
Prioritising certain services
Microsoft have detailed that they’re focusing the “highest level of monitoring” on services related to emergency services, medical supply management, healthbots, and more.
They have also introduced some temporary restrictions to help ease the load – free offers are being limited, to keep capacity available for “existing customers”, and certain resources are being “soft” limited for new subscriptions. Customers can raise support tickets to raise these soft limits, but Microsoft do say that other geographical regions may need to be used to help manage demand.
Teams changes
Microsoft have made a number of small changes to Teams in an effort to reduce bandwidth. They scaled back how often it checks for people’s “presence” (whether they’re online or not), reduced the video resolution, limited how quickly it shows if the other user is typing, and made OneNote within Teams read-only for non-education tenants. All small changes that won’t really impact users but, collectively, must make quite a difference to the bandwidth being used.
A pretty quiet March from Microsoft again – the main changes being:
VDA add-on for M365 E3/E5 added
Updated Windows 10 use rights for Microsoft 365 F1*. It can now use prior versions, access VDI, and use KMS activation.
Number of O365 licenses required for Multi-Geo Capabilities reduced from 500 to 250.
*It was called Microsoft F1 at the time but they have subsequently announced this product will be renamed to Microsoft 365 F3, and a new F1 will be introduced as well.
Microsoft have finally announced per-device licensing of Office 365 Pro Plus* for commercial organisations – following its introduction to the education EES agreement last year. Coming, like a Hollywood blockbuster, in “summer 2020” – this is something that some organisations have been waiting on for a LONG time – particularly in verticals such as retail and manufacturing.
How to use it
As ever, there are conditions to its availability:
Only available as an add-on license
Only available via EA/EAS
Device must be Windows 10 – version 1803 or later
Office Pro Plus must be version 1907 or later
Device must be Azure Active Directory (AD) or hybrid AD joined
and there are various steps that need to be taken to enable it, including group policy changes.
I’ve long said that Microsoft would do this one day as a big portion of their customers wanted it and a sizeable chunk of potential cloud business was being blocked. If you’re a Microsoft customer who’s been holding out on moving to the cloud, expect a call from your friendly neighbourhood partner soon 😊
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 